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they should owe their offices to character rather than nepotism. Similar opinions were voiced by Andreas Giezendanner, founder of the Moral Society, on 26 th April 1797, and were echoed by Bräker - for example in his diary for 1771 and on 26 th April 1790. In August 1793 he writes denouncing a system that forced officials to borrow money for bribes to obtain their office, and then to recoup it by extracting as much as they could from the people they governed. He also satirises ignorant, pretentious and greedy officials in his play "Gerichtsnacht" in 1780.

In the 18th century the Toggenburg was not a land envied by its neighbours. "Who the devil would want to go there!" exclaims a monk of St. Gallen overheard by Bräker [see diary, 21st Dec.1790]. It had a long-standing reputation, even among educated people, for being a rough uncultivated land, inhabited by rough uncultivated people, stubborn, ungovernable, quarrelsome and vindictive, and far too fond of divorce and litigation, which often led them into financial ruin. Bräker records some of these prejudices in one of his dialogues, part of his "Gerichtsnacht", written in 1780. The speakers are two soldiers returned from foreign service. The first, Rasch (his name means "impetuous"), has not a good word for his homeland: "They say people in the mountains are honest - the devil they are! All stinking rotten nonsense. Our forebears were fools, utter dimwits, to settle in these wild snowy mountains, where it's summer for just three months, and half the time it's snowing, blowing a gale or hail, where there's nothing to see but monstrous great mountains and horrible forests, nothing to eat but potatoes and milk, and cabbage, if the caterpillars and slugs have left any. But our forebears were most likely wild fellows, as you can see from their descendants [...] for my money they're a worthless, wild, insubordinate tribe, with neither love nor loyalty, full of lies and malice through and through - and the women! Brother, I've often thought that Heaven in its wrath must have thrown down these bloodsuckers to tame the disobedient sons of the Toggenburg [...]"

His companion, Hohlenstein, takes quite a different view: "What's wrong with our little country? Sure, it has mountains, but that makes for the finest harmony, the most charming variety - different things to see every quarter of an hour. The winters are long, but that makes for health and good harvests. Doesn't every little valley in the mountains nourish a host of contented people - where will you find more fruitful pasture and cropland in a shorter while? No, brother, I don't prefer any land in the world above my homeland, nor any town above the one where I was born. Nowhere does the sun shine more beautifully from behind the mountains, nowhere does the sky look so lovely and blue, nowhere does the moon roll more serenely through the silent night, nowhere do the stars sparkle more finely, nowhere are air and water so refreshing, so healthy and so pure, as here where I dwell [...] nowhere do the blackbird and the lark sing so clearly [...here are] the most pleasant levels, the most beautiful hillsides in shadow and in sunlight, interspersed with stands of all kinds of trees [...]" But Rasch snaps back at him with another long grumble ending "and what do I get out of your streams, from the sun and the moon and the stars, and your shrieking birds - when I have nowt to put in my gob?"

The fact is that one cannot easily be sure which of these two speakers to believe. The Toggenburg attracted little attention in the 18 th century. Sources from within Switzerland, as we shall see, are few, and write mainly at the end of the century. Two English writers, Coxe and Stanyan, are not much help as far as the Toggenburg is concerned, since I can find no evidence that either of them ever saw it. Both write about Appenzell: Stanyan [p 12] says that the earth there "...treats the inhabitants like a hard step-mother, [she] gives them what is necessary for Life, but little for Luxury...". Coxe, as already noted, gives an impression of modest comfort produced by hard work. Foreign writers on Switzerland also often speak of the Swiss peasant in highly laudatory terms, which do not very well agree with Swiss sources, certainly not with Bräker's own writings. Voellmy (v 2 p 28) merely says that the Toggenburg was better governed than most of the subject lands, under the mild rule of Abbot Beda Angehrn.

I conclude that the Toggenburg was a place where most people perhaps managed to obtain the bare necessities of life, but had little in the way of luxury or reserves to cushion a stroke of bad luck. Bräker's daily life, both in his parents' home and then in his own, seems to have been fairly

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